


you're a carnival on a summer night

by independentalto



Series: (all that i can hear is) a simple song [6]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, One-Sided Attraction, Songfic, Unrequited Crush, oh it's sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-01-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:27:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22156252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/independentalto/pseuds/independentalto
Summary: Fitzhateshurting.
Relationships: Lance Hunter/Bobbi Morse, Leo Fitz & Lance Hunter
Series: (all that i can hear is) a simple song [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1594819
Comments: 7
Kudos: 11





	you're a carnival on a summer night

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by Lady Antebellum's "Hurt".

Sometimes, Fitz hates how much he  _ hurts.  _

He’s always been one to let his cuts run deep -- from his first unrequited crush somewhere in primary school to the stinging rejection that was Jemma Simmons -- and he’s never quite figured out how to lessen the cut, only how to find the best ways to rub salt into them. But the years have allowed him to gather and build his walls to the point where anyone attempting to climb them is viewed with the utmost suspicion. It’s something he’s become quite good at, he thinks. And while it does a heavy amount of damage, Jemma’s absence from the base is just as much of a help.

No one hurts Leopold Fitz. Not anymore. (This is emotionally, at least. Physically is another story.) 

The first time their eyes meet across the debriefing room, Coulson having called an all-team meeting to introduce  _ him _ to the team, Fitz isn’t even thinking about his walls at all. He’s muttering to an apparition only visible to his eyes, a younger, less haunted Jemma Simmons murmuring in his ear about their current predicament in the lab. And for a long time, he’s just that --  _ just Hunter, mate,  _ he says to anyone that asks -- their paths intertwining at most mistakenly ever once in a blue moon. 

It stays that way until one long night, Hunter finds Fitz sipping at a lukewarm beer in the empty common room. For once, Jemma’s voice isn’t insistent in his ear, and the silence in the room is amicable until Hunter, pitying the lack of condensation on Fitz’s beer, hands him a fresh one before cracking open his own. That night, the words flow faster than the froth on the lips of their bottles, and for the first time in a long time, Fitz doesn’t mind that he’s in someone else’s company. 

Hunter’s appearance at the lab the next morning raises a few of Fitz’s hackles, but when the mercenary simply launches into a continuation of the argument he’d begun last night before May had grumpily shown up and kicked them out of the common room, he lets himself relax. The argument goes as smashingly as it would have had both of them been drunk, and Jemma Simmons’ voice doesn’t show up in his head until much later that night, wondering if associating with a feisty spirit such as Lance Hunter is the greatest of ideas. 

Fitz tells the voice to fuck off, and he only feels momentarily guilty before the urge to construct his argument to present to Hunter the next morning kicks in. 

The days continue as such -- the arguments rotate, of course, but the beginning of a new day either finds Hunter conversing animatedly with Fitz in the lab or the two of them bickering gently in the garage. Fitz eventually learns his way around a toolbox. Hunter, somewhere between arguing with the Scot about the football for the fifteenth time and somehow not making the garage blow up, manages to hand Fitz the right instruments about 85% of the time. The lights come back on in Fitz’s eyes ever so slowly, and he learns to participate at team mealtimes again, even snarking at Skye, who pretends to act offended behind a veil of tears. 

Fitz finds that Jemma’s voice appears less and less, replaced instead by an occasional clap on the back from Hunter or a gruff murmur of encouragement whenever one of his experiments his a wall. It’s somewhere between the third and fourth month she’s gone that her voice doesn’t appear for an entire week -- the week, Fitz notes with surprise, that’d started with Hunter practically kidnapping him, shoving him into a SHIELD vehicle, and driving them to the nearest pub because  _ if I have another crappy light ale I’m going to start drinking the mouthwash, they taste exactly the same.  _

It’s the same night he finds himself staring at Hunter talk about their latest mission (at least, what he can tell of it, anyways, and what he can’t tell he exaggeratedly hints at, something he’s mentioned multiple times he wished his ex-wife did), and out of the blue, he wonders if he could stop the impassioned mumbling with a kiss. There must be an odd look on his face, for in the next minute, Hunter sizes him up, and it’s only through a knee-jerk reaction that Fitz is able to cover for himself. 

(He still wonders about it, though. So deep into the night that he falls asleep in his eggs the next morning. Hunter takes the opportunity to coin the nickname ‘Fitzy bird’ for him, even going so far as to use it on missions. May is  _ not  _ amused.)

The thought strikes him again as Hunter preps him for his re-certification, grasping Fitz’s hands tightly when they go through handling firearms; yet again when they practice some light sparring and he’s suddenly flush with the Brit’s chest. It’s simple, yet tantalizing: Hunter’s a light, and Fitz is the moth drawn to it; Hunter is the Earth, and Fitz is the moon, drawn to his orbit. 

Hunter is a summer carnival, easy for Fitz to get lost in but somehow almost immediately calls home. And Fitz  _ knows  _ he’s falling,  _ knows  _ he’s lost, but the lights are so inviting and nothing seems to be of harm --

He forgets that all good things come to an end. And that once carnivals leave, they leave nothing but an empty, barren field. 

Jemma Simmons re-enters his life with all the force of a galestorm, short haircut and edgy wardrobe and all. It’s most certainly a shock to -- well, to  _ whatever  _ he’d been doing with Hunter, popping the bubble he’s so carefully construed for himself and forcing him to reconcile the image of her with the image she’d left him with. That, Fitz figures, will be difficult enough. After all, feelings for your best friend don’t just go away, no matter how long they’ve been gone. 

The final nail in the coffin is Bobbi Morse. Tall, sharp, blonde and utterly every man’s (and woman’s, he suspects, after watching Jemma fawn over the taller agent for ten minutes straight) dream, it’s really only the cruelest twists of fate that merge the title of ‘demon ex-wife’ with the woman standing in front of him. A few fraught missions later finds Bobbi and Hunter bickering so loudly Coulson pointedly walks by them wearing earplugs; the day after that finds the both of them at the breakfast bar looking tired, but satisfied. 

All of a sudden, it’s Jemma in the lab instead of Hunter, and while she gets the instrument right 100% of the time, it makes his off days fairly empty, as Mack prefers to work alone and there’s no way he’s qualified to train with the field agents. The seat beside him is empty when he turns on the TV to watch football, and most of the games stretch in silence, the lack of Hunter’s pointed barbs leaving Fitz to sip his beer alone. 

And now it’s  _ Bobbi and Hunter  _ on missions and  _ Bobbi and Hunter  _ drinking together at night and  _ Bobbi and Hunter  _ bickering like a married couple in the kitchen before anyone’s had their coffee. Fitz wishes he could hate Bobbi for it, put every fiber of his being into hating her (for what exactly, he still needs to fine-tune. Taking his best friend? His closest teammate? His...no. It wasn’t that), but how can he hate someone that Hunter looks at like they hung the stars? 

He’s really only got himself to blame for it -- him and his dumb, naive self that had accidentally let his walls slip to let Lance Hunter in. Apparently, Leopold Fitz never learned. 

(Skye -- or Daisy, rather, he’s still trying to get used to the name change -- catches him looking at them forlornly during dinner one day, and she just reaches over and squeezes his hand in understanding. She shows up later that night to Fitz’s newly solo common room drinking hours, replacing the warm beer in his hand with a fresh one before plopping next to him on the couch and leaning into him. 

They don’t say anything, but he knows she understands. It’s about all he can ask for.) 

The most pathetic part about it? 3 AM one day, when Fitz finds Hunter despondently nursing a beer so warm it was almost boiling, so  _ he  _ switches it for a fresh one and sits on the couch, purposely picking an argument if only for the sake of seeing the fight come back into Hunter’s eyes. It wouldn’t be pathetic if it only happened once. It was pathetic when it happened at least twice a week. 

And after every time, he watches as Hunter stumbles to his room, he and Bobbi’s muffled voices picking up briefly before falling into silence, allowing Fitz to take his cue and head to bed. And every time, it’s as if Sif’s sword slashes through him from shoulder to torso while Grant Ward rubs in salt from the Dead Sea. 

Every time, he tells himself it won’t happen again: he’s only going to get hurt more if he does. He should know that. It’s what people like Hunter do. What  _ people  _ do. 

But at the same time, he knows that should they both live to be a thousand, he’d  _ still  _ find Hunter on the couch and switch out his beer. 

**Author's Note:**

> This song has applied to everyone I've felt things about, and I think it's given me problems.


End file.
